r/theprimeagen

A useful agentic change does not end when the diff appears. It ends when the system is coherent again.

I watched this exact loop last month: we asked an agent to tighten signup validation. It updated the form, the server-side validator, even the e2e test. Green across the board. We shipped. Two minutes later realized the password reset was broken.

A software change is not merely code moving. It is a shift in the requirement set.
There's a gap between the physical system (code, tests, schemas, diffs) and the theoretical system (requirements, contracts, constraints). Agents edit the former. We care about the latter.

When those two layers drift apart, an agent can satisfy the explicit task while breaking an implicit requirement nobody named and no automated check protects.

This post is my attempt to reason about that gap, and how to structure an agentic engineering harness around requirements, contracts, and deterministic feedback loops instead of just writing longer instruction files.

If you're interested, give it a read. If not, maybe let me know what I could do better!

Appreciate any feedback, and happy to partake in discussions :)

My(27M) girlfriend’s(26F) friend’s(25F) boyfriend(32M) was showing me an application he built for work (he’s an accountant) on his laptop. He was pretty proud of it and it did what he wanted pretty well (PDF gen with a pretty extensive data layer, the UI was 23 buttons vertically stacked on the left side of the page). However while he was finishing I noticed that he had literally every single project he had ever done all in one git repo. hello worlds, his personal website, a unity game, all of it in one repo. This included 15 python tools he had built for somewhat advanced file processing and routing.

I asked if he had just one git repo and he said “Ya I wanted to have everything in one place so it wouldn’t get mixed up with other people’s repo, and I don’t have to go to each repo and pull each one down” Every project he would just make a new branch, work on that branch, and just never stop working on the branch. In his local he would just ignore the other projects.

“If it ever yells at me I just use git stash or move everything else then move it back”

It was incredible how extensively he used git and failed to grasp why it was used. He said “I started using it because I heard it what programmers used for this kinda stuff so I figured I should” and also said “Main is the one I use the most” which he would use to push his meeting notes from the day, and also occasionally use a folder called FileTranser (his typo not mine). He would use it a lot, sometimes pushing then deleting the same file multiple times in a row.

He is a lot smarter than this post makes him seem, but it was crazy how little he grasped git after using it daily for over a year.

I didn’t want to be that guy, so I just said “Whatever works for you man” and started talking about something normal, but I’m still kinda haunted by it. I feel kinda guilty, and like I should have said something. Has anyone made this mistake as a beginner, or seen someone else do stuff this crazy with git?

i just came across this thing on my facebook and i think that it's worth sharing

>I wish there was a world where writing code by hand and using agents can co-exist.

>I wish that people who likes using agents respect the expressiveness and craftsmanship of people who likes to code by hand. I wish that people who hand-code can see the ceiling of scale and creativity when the right person uses agents.

>I wish that they can see what is lost and gained, and that we can do both. Write it by hand when we want to feel intimate and proud, write it with agents when we want to tackle the scale.

>I wish there's more nuance in fact that there can be any amount of engineering thoughts put into using agents, and that you can put as much effort into thinking as you'd like. It's not always just "vibe coding" because there is an AGENTS.md.

>I wish that people coding with agents stop measuring themselves with sheer efficiency, how fast they can produce "slop" and get things "working", but stop and take the time to notice when the structure and the code is bad and when it is good.

>I wish they care more about engineering practices as they work with a huge amount of agent-generated code, and they care even more about the thought processes put into it. Despite the volume, I wish they can still care about what they're crafting.

>I wish that people appreciate the ceiling, despite the floor.

>I wish people still realize there is beauty in writing code itself that never, ever goes away despite a world filled with agents. What it means when code is beautiful, when a programming language is beautiful, or when the code smells.

>I wish the spirit of the early age of programming never goes away. Spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club. Spirit of building your own games on BASIC and sharing it with friends. Spirit of reading data sheets and writing programs for new hardware.

>I wish people keep experiencing the joy of discovering new programming languages, and the love and care put into it. Try writing Gleam, Kotlin, Elixir, Ruby or Clojure, and you can feel how much love is put into making the coding experience fun.

>For me, there are things that are lost and things that are gained when automating code away. I felt less self-ownership to my code, less proud of it and I don't have the same sense of pride that I wrote this myself.

>I don't feel the lay of the land as vivid anymore. The mental image are much looser, despite me still knowing fairly well what each part of the code does. Despite the fun gained in what I can build, the intimacy I once had is lost.

>In a world filled with vibe-coders who are overexcited about making things, I wonder who still cares about how things are made. I wish that the artisans who expresses themselves through code never, ever stop doing so.

>The likes of Bisqwit, Jonathan Blow, John Carmack, Terry Davis, Fabrice Bellard, Rich Hickey. I wish they keep doing their thing, keep showing people the sheer joy and fun of programming, and the craft never dies.

>I felt sad that the people who read this will not even care, or they will feel like they don't share either's values. The two will never understand each other. The world I wished for does not exist.

>It hurts as I read everyday that "programmers do it for the money, no one cares about the code". I personally hate everyone who says that with a straight face.

>I just wish there is a world where the two group isn't so diametrically opposed to one another.

>I wish that ten years from now, we still can smell the code and appreciate it when code is stinky or beautiful.

ps. 1. for source of post i think it may broke the rule about personal information so i will not paste it here
2. i'm not native english speaker
3. this account look recently created because im just concern with my main account privacy (i'm not bot in case of someone try to fame me)

It's exactly what it sounds like.

Use at your own risk, folks!

Last post I shared was AI generated and got a good amount of negative feedback but I thought the discourse for discussion on the topic was still valid. I guess I’ll avoid posting clanker content going forward. I’m mostly not a big fan of it either but there are times when valid talking points are brought up in the content.

On that note, hopefully this is an interesting deep dive for you guys to compare against other stacks you’ve set up yourselves.